Pinnacle Studio DVD conversion help!

[dberlener]

Years ago I had purchased and made several DVD's of family vacations, kids sports, etc. using Pinnacle Studio 8. I do not have the data saved in my PC that I used to produce (render) these DVDs as they took up a large amount of HD space. They play fine in my DVD player but I would like to convert them into a format that I can save them and use them such as MP4 or something without losing that much resolution along the way.

When I put in a DVD into my PC, it shows a folder called Video_TS. What can I use to read these DVD's and save them into something other than this Video_TS format. It doesn't seem to play nice with things like windows media player.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

[filmboss80]

It would simply be best to back up your existing DVD. Converting to a format like MP4 will involve compression, and compression means throwing out information. In essence, each conversion diminishes the video more and more. Highly compressed video files are also more difficult to edit.

If you are having difficulty playing your DVDs with Windows Media Player, switch to something better, like VLC.

I hope you did not get rid of the camera-original footage. It is essential to archive that, especially with recordings of memorable family events.

[dberlener]

Thanks for your reply. I have the original tapes but have spent hours editing the footage I want to keep and that is on my DVDs. Another thing I wish to do is stream them from my PC over my xbox360 onto my TV whenever a family member wants to see a video. It will not recognize this TS format and open it. It does work with no problems of video in other formats such as avi or mp4. Anything out there that will do this? I understand the resolution will go down a bit but it was HI 8 video anyway so it is only VCR quality to begin with.

[filmboss80]

No, it is not TS format, but rather a VIDEO_TS folder. (Check out this link: https://www.videohelp.com/dvd and scroll down to the part about DVD folder and file structures.) The video format is actually mpeg-2, contained inside a .vob file within the VIDEO_TS folder (if authored correctly). If you want to make avi files from the DVDs, use a tool like AutoGK.

Don't use Pinnacle for any conversion. It sucks royally.